a/n: for context: most of this was supposed to come out much later. some of this wasn't supposed to be here at all. this chapter is practically my last week's musings and wasn't supposed to be a chapter at all.

but the momentous chapter i'd planned to actually update today got split in two, i think having this as an 'interlude' to it makes much more sense given how the story will unfold

. . .


Let The Games Begin / Let The Flames Begin


Summary of the chapter:

"Guess we still have some unfinished business left to sort through."

. . .


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years ago

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"What's wrong, Sasuke?"

Naruto tilts his head methodically, the blankness of his features perfectly devoid of feeling, his half-lidded state impeccably vacant, the picture of boredom.

"It's just a game."

Sasuke scoffs under his breath. A humorless smirk slants his face when he faces him. "...That's right."

His whispered admittance does nothing to stifle the murderous intent unfolding between them; it's coming off of Naruto in spades.

"You knew it was." Naruto prods, barely above a breath. And can't bring himself to feel even crumbs of compunction underneath the selfishness, atop the detachment.

Can't force himself inside a feeling he doesn't own.

"You asked for this." It's everything but a subtle threat.

The pull of Sasuke's smirk widens marginally. For all to see he seems exhausted, but there's a pristine fire kindling his higher ambition, one he's never paraded before, swallowing him whole now.

Just the sight of it is enough to burn.

Naruto calmly gets to his feet, steels himself for the inevitable war they've been toeing the ghostly lines of for a good two years now.

"You're the smartest kid I've met." Sasuke acknowledges. As if these coveted words are supposed to be a revelation of sorts, they aren't; as if they're meant to mean something to Naruto, they don't.

"I don't know what you're talking about." Naruto slowly says, his dilating grin an amalgamation, innocent and blood curdling, souring elation. "I'm just a thickheaded, gullible and clueless thirteen year old. Isn't that right, Sasuke?"

Sasuke shakes his head to himself, inklings of a quasi amusement shaking into his aplomb. "You could have it, if you just wanted–tremendous, endless power...you could have anything you want." Sasuke's quiet wonderment morphs into a loathsome hiss.

Naruto lingers immobile, absorbs every negligible detail, memorizes every crease of the boy's familiar features, the artwork of his volatile intentions, the depth to his full-fledged hatred. Paints him in strokes of beautiful black against the white canvas of his flawed mind.

And thinks he won't see him again.

Chakra infuses the rigidity of his muscles, an undercurrent of rawness imbuing the threads of his cells.

His fingers twitch with anticipation.

"...but you're ruled by your emotions." Sasuke utters menacingly, truthfully. "And in the end they'll be your downfall." He's cogent, camouflaged, composed. Hateful. "But we both knew that already. Isn't that right, Naruto?"

Naruto's vision warps, streaks of scarlet bleed through the ridges stitching his soul together. "...You're the one asking for this."

Sasuke wears truth like blood. Conceals himself behind the shadow of untold masks Naruto will have to tear off his skin by the inch to truly see.

But Naruto's already seeing red.

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.

"Lost inside your head again?"

Naruto grunts softly in the back of his throat, a noncommittal noise as he pouts a bit at the ground, sat and slouched and a bit emptied out.

His fingers curl inward, hide the vermilion thin crosscut of streaks grazing his palms.

Jiraiya sits close by, maintaining enough distance to give him a sense of privacy, which Naruto is grateful for.

The man doesn't roundabout it, there's no need for subtlety, and frankly, it's refreshing. "It's been a year since your frien–"

"He wasn't my friend." Naruto corrects for the umpteenth time, sincere. "He never was. You know that, I told you."

The wind blows sharply through ragged gaps, weaves its way around limping branches, a cool whisper across his skin as his stare sweeps vacant over the tangled shrubbery.

"It was just a game."

It's meant to be a confession, but it isn't.

It's supposed to be a secret, it's not.

A beat more and Jiraiya lets go of a long, world-weary sigh. "So you've said."

In the end it feels like he's the one who lost, although Sasuke is the one who chose to walk out. How peculiar is that?

"...But he's gray again." Naruto shrugs again. It comes across as resignation. He lets his nails sink into his tender flesh that bit deeper, and doesn't feel anything for it.

Jiraiya cuts him a sidelong look. "And you can't stand the gray."

"It's just..." A frown strains his features taut, angry knots tangle his gut. "Everyone's just..."

Gray.

Undecided.

Unreal.

Naruto lives in black and white. Either, or. There's no in between, because an in-between just doesn't exist.

Gray is nothing. It isn't a feeling, nor an emotion. Its intangibility lies in the absence of light and darkness, an ambiguous limbo. It can't exist. Not in his world, it doesn't work like that.

But no one else seems to get it.

Everyone's already chosen to live a life in shades of gray.

They waste their time away. Caught up in the throes of mundane lives. Tarnished wills. Insatiable greed. It's all so...disgusting, flawed, pathetic.

Weak.

Just when he thought Sasuke had escaped the clutches of this gnarly gray.

Just when Naruto was finally starting to—

"...how pathetic." Naruto mumbles apathetically.

Sasuke's betrayal doesn't sting, or cut. Doesn't pull at stitches, or smears blood over deadened scars.

Not anymore.

And maybe that's...

Naruto crumples in on himself a bit.

"You know kiddo, you're so much smarter than you let on." Jiraiya suddenly reaches over to ruffle his hair, his solemn tone undercut by the fatherly gesture, fatherly concern bleeding right into it. "...but this means life is harder for you."

Naruto sinks into the charted melancholy for a good two seconds, catches his breath in between.

Then he's gently shaking the hand, the comfort, off.

Creates another rift, hides.

"I don't know what you mean." Naruto pastes on his habitual, perfected smile. "I'm just a clueless fourteen year old."

Jiraiya is expecting the brush off, watches him understandingly, gravelly. But Naruto doesn't hold the stare for long enough to actually see.

Sasuke's betrayal doesn't hurt anymore.

...maybe that's the issue.

In fact, Naruto is feeling nothing. Nothing at all.

...and this never forebodes anything good.

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months ago

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In the wreckage the hospital had been, against the frailty of it, Naruto would curl up just outside Kakashi's makeshift room. He remained unmoving for hours and hours on end. The sight of him was terrifying, he looked nothing more than a corpse surviving on borrowed time.

Naruto is curled up on the floor, the cracks in the tiles run deep enough to scar through him whole, heart shattered, the world lying in glass pieces broken beneath his feet, he knows nothing but loss.

Fingers dig deep in his ribcage. The red blood has since dried over, staining his fingers in coal black clots, it's stale with death.

You couldn't save him, the cacophony of voices say, so cruel and disfigured they might as well be his own. He's dead. He's dead. Deaddeaddeaddead

Naruto slowly lifts his chin from his chest, whispers of a cool wind pressing him against the motion.

Beside Kakashi's forlorn form, his mentor looms tall, seemingly a guardian summoned to the bedside of a dying man. On the bedside table beside the lonesome patient's bed, a lonely book lies unread.

Calloused fingers graze the hardcover of their own labor.

Naruto watches, stitched into a body that's little more than a lifeless corpse and little less than a sentient human, with eyes swollen and lidded and scrutinizing, afraid of not desperately memorizing, drowning in silhouettes and regrets, chest bursting with oppressive wonderment.

Jiraiya stares back.

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"...Sasuke?"

The name gets pushed out of his throat like bile and fresh relief simultaneously in light of the news he's still wrapping his head around of.

There's a small, almost playful smirk hanging to his lips when Sasuke answers. "In flesh and bones."

Sasuke's smirk slowly wanes into something milder and more subdued, and then he's speaking once more, and by this point in time it's like the walls won't ever stop spinning around them.

"Guess we still have some unfinished business left to sort through."

'...the game.' Naruto's thunderbolt thought jolts him into a splitting shock.

Jiraiya stands across from him, on the other end of the room. Aware. Taciturn. Overfamiliar.

Short of a few weeks dead.

Naruto flattens himself against the door with shrinking lungs and a drowning resolve.

Blood pounds vigorously in his eardrums, burns the roof of his mouth, stings his sinuses, bursts out of his nose. A matter of seconds, his eyes roll to the back of his skull.

Naruto passes out on the spot.

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"...What am I supposed to do?"

His voice is unrecognizable, sounding like a jarring dissonance, like someone shaved his vocal cords, tapered them off at the end to produce this subdued strangle which is supposed to sound human, but is too hollow to be.

Only now that he spoke the thought out loud does he notice the silence he is blanketed in, unable to hear anything but his shallow inhales and exhales. How can it be this quiet when static terror is buzzing so loudly inside of him? But then, maybe that's what's drowning out every other sound.

Jiraiya eyes the incriminating piece creaking in his cold-blooded hold, eyeing him while the stream of lifeblood beating underneath his skin gives to a deathlike pallor, eyes him as if he could hold all the answers Naruto so precariously seeks.

Underneath the artificial washed light he looks too real—

None of this is supposed to be happening.

There is a rip, something coming apart, Naruto knows, he can hear it in his eardrums, can see it behind his eyelids, he can feel it.

With the stitching coming loose Naruto's world, a sheltered dome of jagged but ultimately frangible glass all around him, starts cracking again.

Jiraiya, silent witness to it all, will linger in presence, until morning comes.

Until his corrupted mind wipes him clean once more.

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"'Losing?'"

Sasuke's lone figure is contrasting and at the same time blending into the looming night, but his features grow gradually clearer once he steps forward, until he is crouching down in front of him.

"If it's a game you're playing at, then you're the only player here."

...what is Sasuke even talking about?

The game's been set in motion already, ending with his betrayal.

Naruto could swear Sasuke's eyes gleam a dash of fire red in the distorted, macabre moonlight behind him and for the split of a second the sky is oozing crimson like an open wound.

"And it's precisely why you will lose, Naruto..." Sasuke utters under his breath, face closing off, downcast. "…you will lose everything."

They've both been reaping the seeds they've sown for years now.

...then why is he talking like the game has just begun?

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weeks ago

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"Why are you even here–"

He rasps, windless, desperate, the quietude goes disrupting with the seconds ticking by.

"...d–did you wait until now...to say that you w–won?"

Their godforsaken game. He thought they were done with it.

And the shock slowly dissolves; under the enormity of loss everything else dissolves and loses its meaning.

Jiraiya lingers a few feet away, donned in sorrow as if it were a second skin, eye level and watching him struggle through an infinite hell, demons he's all too well acquainted with.

Naruto loses grip and focus, foils on the pavement like a lifeless toy, exhausted and listless and searching, reaching for him still.

And everything, everything he so desperately tried to suppress, it all comes surfacing back. Merciless waves of pain he drowns under.

Naruto dissolves inside his fathomless loss, the unending tragedy of it.

The dissonant, fragmented pieces rip apart the same way his world did, they tear open the same way the inside of him did. With no gospel truth to keep them attached to him any longer, the ineludible truth bleeds out, relentless in its ruthlessness.

Jiraiya showcases truth and regret in a single breath, his saddest smile yet.

He drowns beneath it, too.

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days ago

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"Did the nightmares start again?"

He jerks in place, cutting off on a smothering gasp and scrambling back, until he discerns Sasuke sat in the pitch blackness of his room. With hands loosely clasped between the jut of his knees, head hung, until he's tipping his chin enough to detain him in his field of vision, continuing sombre and resigned.

"It was only a matter of time, don't you think?"

Naruto feverishly puzzles about how Sasuke would even know but—

But Jiraiya stands motionless against the creeping shadows.

Leaving Naruto to ponder just how someone who bore witness to many of his horrific nightmares throughout the years, now becomes the subject matter of them.

His stomach churns into the awareness that he'll be physically sick next.

Naruto rushes past Sasuke, past the phantom of his mentor, lingering still like a sickness to the forefront of his mind.

Blood is thicker than water, but what in the world is left to do when that blood pools into the water and sullies the unadulterated pureness of it.

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today

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"Does the site jog your memories?"

Naruto funnels what's left of his wavering concentration, his lungs expand from oxygen so icy and pure he'll eventually lose too.

"Is it somewhere you recognize?" Jiraiya keeps inquiring, gaze thinly narrowed as he sifts through the sprawling, finite topography ahead. "Or some place you wanted to see?"

Obfuscated facets slowly swim into focus, but it's not the closed in landscape he's focusing on.

It's been a handful of times that he's seen him since his untimely demise.

"I was thinking it's actually a metaphor of some kind, I just haven't figured out what for...yet." The steady back facing him sags, shoulders uplifting with a dry allusion to humor. "Suppose I've got nothing but time, huh?"

What sets this instance apart from every other one, however...

"So you're allowed to talk now?"

Naruto finally finds the voice to ask. Unaware how he remains standing when he's being uprooted yet again, when Jiraiya stays sitting unwavering right where he stands.

But then his teacher cranes his neck with that wry grin he's seen so many times over, an expression he's so often been in receipt of, thrown over his shoulder. Sent his way, one more time, when he'd bet all his wasted hope on its absence.

"Allegedly." Jiraiya simply answers.

Naruto blinks away the prickling warmth from a depth he's drowning in, an ocean of tears he's floating on.

The airless response is punched out of him.

"...Oh."


. . .

a/n:

not to sound like a pretentious bitch but these are some of my absolute favorite chapters i've ever written (with chapter 21 taking the cake!) and i'm so glad i could include them again underneath a slightly different light.

did i ever mention Naruto was an unreliable narrator? hmmmmmmmmmm did i? maybe once, in passing? maybe, maybe?

well, the cat's out of the bag now...not. nope. not yet. hey, at least the tag 'Mind Games' will finally start making sense now...or not?

okay, see you all next chapter which is THE chapter i've been waiting to post for, actually a year now? and it's THE most important up till now? no pressure or anything haha.

it's gonna be...intense, i feel.